Get your logins. Store them safely. Celebrate!

Reading time: 10 minutes

Every day is a holiday to somebody. What’s one more to add to the list? Let me give you a little background.

Often, I work with clients who have previously had a volunteer run some important part of their arts marketing arsenal — usually their website, or their email marketing. In many cases, the volunteer is a friend or family member connected to a board member, and the organization is drawn to the promise of free technical help. “My brother is a web developer; let me see if I can talk him into running our website for us!”

The concept of free service

The concept of free service because of a good connection is incredibly attractive to some arts groups where money is especially tight. And sometimes it works out really well for a long time. But it can also easily lead to disaster.

When the board member leaves the board, often the strength of the volunteer connection leaves too. Oh, that free web developer can stick around for awhile, but in many cases the response time to get something updated gets longer and longer. Finally it starts to damage the organization’s ability to manipulate their own marketing information, such as being able to update the website, send out the email, etc. And in the worst cases, your volunteer website updater just disappears into thin air, taking your logins and passwords with them. That’s bad. But it is not as rare as you might think — I’ve now worked with four clients who have had it happen to them. The most recent two needed to register totally new domain names and set up brand new websites at considerable expense, because they couldn’t get access from their previous web developer.

Volunteering isn’t a bad thing. Many arts groups wouldn’t be able to get by if they didn’t use volunteers to get things done. But volunteers need to be managed, and they shouldn’t ever have access to things we don’t have access to ourselves. And that means access to all of your login information to your website, Facebook/Twitter, email marketing software, etc., or what I call “the keys to the kingdom.”

If they have passwords, you should know them too — they should be stored in a word document somewhere and marked “to be used in the case that our web developer disappears.” How do you get this information if you don’t already have it? Simple: ask your developer. But do so carefully.

How to get the logins

Now, a lot of developers are a little paranoid about logins and passwords. And you’ll need to be tactful when asking for this information, and do so in a way that does not make the developer feel like you want to can them. Everybody wants to feel useful, and if you put yourself in their shoes, without knowing the reason for the request, you might be a little nervous too.

The easiest way to get this info is to ask for a “check in meeting” with them. First, compliment them on how much they’ve helped your organization, and mention that things are going great, and that you hope they’ll be able to continue to help your organization for a very long time. Then, tell them that the board is going through a process of doing a record keeping/information inventory, and they would like a document with all login information, passwords, urls, etc. so in the *knock on wood* case that something were to happen to any staff member who holds key information, the organization could continue with its work. Then say “Even though it’s a little bit of a hassle for us to gather this info together, I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s a reasonable and smart request.” That last part is important to gain agreement, as nobody wants to be thought of as unreasonable. Then, set a date that the information is due by, get their agreement, tell them that you’ll be updating the document every 6 months, and finish off with another compliment on their work. Finally, have the info that has been provided to you examined by a different  technology friend of yours, to make sure everything you need is there.

How else can you protect your access?

Potential problems don’t just come from the web developer side of things; the arts organization needs to think in advance and do its part too. For example, make sure that your website isn’t hosted by the volunteer web developer. It should be hosted with a reliable 3rd-party company such as dreamhost.com or mediatemple.com (those are just two examples of many), so that a potential problem with your volunteer doesn’t mean a problem with your web hosting. As you make technology decisions, ask yourself “Will I be relying on only this individual to gain access, or could someone else get access if I needed them to?”

Any reputable web developer or “tech person” won’t hold on to your information. It isn’t theirs — it’s yours. They should only be acting as a steward of your data, making updates as needed. If they balk, find out why, and try to talk to them. It’s always easier to blame the request on somebody else (such as your board) so that you don’t get into a shooting match. But if they won’t give it up, you’ve already got a problem, and it’s better to know about it now than later.

At that point, you should try to get the original board member involved and see if they can come to your rescue to help the situation. But if you follow the outline of the conversation above, you should be able to get all the important info you need without causing any problems, and you’ll still have your volunteer working with you.

But it’s not just for the “problem people”

“Ahh but our tech volunteer is fabulous… he/she would never disappear like that.” Great! In most cases, that will be the case.  Then please consider getting this information from them simply a form of digital insurance. Something you know you’ve planned for, even though it may never happen. And this is no-cost insurance — the very best kind!

Personally I think that volunteers should be only used in situations where the volunteer could be easily replaced with somebody else. The very nature of volunteers is that they are more flexible than an employee, but they don’t have a paycheck governing their behavior or trustworthiness. I’m not trying to put down volunteers. Love them, thank them, count on them, but please don’t risk having them be the only ones who can do “that one thing,” when that one thing can break your organization. Most likely, you now have and will continue to have a great, positive working relationship with your technical person, and this article shouldn’t cast a shadow on that. Just have your info stored for safe keeping!

Spread the word!

So, to help spread the word that arts organizations should walk through this process and recapture access to their own login information, I am declaring this Thursday, September 24th, “National Know Your Arts Marketing Logins Day.” On this day, across the land, I want arts groups everywhere to open their email, and contact their tech helper to get this information. Store it for safe keeping in a couple of places and/or share it with another staff member in your organization for redundancy. What will take your 5 minutes to do could help spare you weeks of lost time, ticket sales, and happiness.

So spread the word! This Thursday is “National Know Your Arts Marketing Logins Day.” Will you celebrate with us? (And if you’re reading this after Thursday, please just go and gather the info now!)

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Only follow folks who post content you're interested in.

I usually write from the perspective of helping arts organizations in a promotional aspect, and I wanted to change lanes for a moment and talk about Twitter use by arts administrators as individuals who may be struggling with “why.”

“Why do I want to use Twitter?”

“What’s the point of knowing what somebody had for lunch? I really don’t care.”

“I followed everybody and now I can’t handle all the tweets.” (Or “twits,” perhaps if you’re referring the the people who tweet stupid things.)

To help answer these questions and more, I’m going to tell you a bit about how I use Twitter. Now, I’m coming from the perspective of using Twitter as a professional and artistic resource, not just another place to gab. More on that below.

1. Use Twitter as a human filter.

Many of you are I’m sure aware of Google Alerts, which is a service by Google that will deliver content via email to you, based on the keywords you select. I use Google Alerts to bring me all sorts of information. As an example, Google sends me alerts based on the keyword “Arts Marketing.” Most of the time, what is sent to me as something to do with the arts. But sometimes, Google does its best and sends me webpages about “Martial Arts Marketing” since it contains the keywords I told it to look for. That’s a little annoying, and I’m sure I could enter more information into Google to get it to subtract “martial” from any searches, but the point is, Google is programmatic and brings back literal results without any consideration to how valuable it will really be to me. Kung-fu is great, but not in my inbox when I was looking for something else.

My Twitter friends however, are smart. They come across a ton of interesting arts articles each day, they scan them, and then tweet about them on Twitter to spread the word. I do the same. Suddenly, I have a “human search engine network” of people that only pass along the really cool arts stuff that is exactly what I am looking for. That saves me time sorting through stuff that doesn’t matter, and fosters collaboration.

But what if your friends are tweeting things you’re not interested in? That’s simple.

2. Only follow people that post content you’re interested in.

The idea that you should follow everybody that follows you on Twitter is just a recipe for information overload. I’m sure you’ve seen people with 15000 followers, who are following 15000 people. How can you realistically keep track of the constant updates of 15000 people? It’s not possible and you shouldn’t waste your time trying it. I’ve always thought its a little rude actually — since I know the person is following 15000 folks, how important are my individual posts to them? Not very. So, follow those people who provide information you’re interested in most of the time, so that you can really use Twitter as a resource for information.

3. 90% of your posts should be information that is useful to those that follow you.

The lunch updates, the random quotes, the posts that don’t mean anything — just don’t post them. People follow other people for useful information, and I ruthlessly unfollow people who don’t post useful content or who I’m not personally connected to. On the flip side, I try to make each one of my Twitter posts link to an interesting article, useful website, great statistic or other resource that arts folks will find helpful. Cut the noise — make your posts helpful, and don’t follow folks who’s posts aren’t helpful to you.

4. Only use about 120 characters in each post, which leaves room for others to retweet.

Twitter gives you 140 characters, which I know is short. But for people to be able to pass your tweet on to their networks, they need to be able to “quote the source” and mention @groupofminds or @yourname or whatever as the originator of the tweet. If you use all of the available space for your message, there won’t be room for them to add their footnote. This drastically reduces the viral-marketing aspect of your tweets. Just use the Twitter character counter to tell you when you’ve used up 120 characters, and leave the rest.

5. Use a url shortener.

I’d like to hug the person who invented url shortners — you may have heard of one of the most popular: http://tinyurl.com. A url shortener is just that — it takes a really long url such as:

http://groupofminds.com/articles/arts-marketing/dear-facebook-want-a-new-revenue-stream-that-will-help-arts-marketing/685

and makes a shortcut to it that lives permanently on the web, that looks something like:

http://tinyurl.com/n4s7lw

because a shorter url means fewer characters used in Twitter. Pretty smart eh? There are many url shortening sites; a quick search of Google will reveal a bunch of them.

Twitter can be extremely useful to arts administrators, as a way to keep up with people they respect in the field, and as a source of knowledge about trends in the arts. With these simple rules of the road, you’ll be able to tame the Twitter information overload beast, and really get to using the system for the elegant communication it was designed to create.

Ron

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(Author’s note: this is an unreleased post from February 2009, which I’ve recently updated due to Zoomerang making some good changes to their website [good job Zoomerang!]. The process is a good exploration of user interface design consultations we do).

Do you have an easy-to-navigate arts website?

What information can we glean for our arts websites from the homepages of commercial companies? Turns out, quite a bit. Let’s look at online survey providers Zoomerang and Survey Monkey as examples. It’s a no-brainer that your website should be easy to navigate. People should be able to find the information they need, with a minimum number of clicks, and there should be as few things to steal my attention away as possible. No annoying ads (are you really making any money with google ads on your site? If not, take them down), no “website hosted by” badges, etc. Just the facts about your organization ma’am. But as I’ll show you in this article using Zoomerang and Survey Monkey as examples, we need to go deeper to make sure we’re displaying what are patrons are looking for right away.

I needed to do some research on online survey capabilities for one of our clients, an ethnic dance festival. I know that Zoomerang and Survey Monkey are the Coke and Pepsi of the online survey world, and for this round, I just needed to know:

• How much does using the service cost  for how long
• Does the service offer secure, encrypted surveys via SSL (https:// style), and how much was that in addition to the regular cost.

Pretty simple laundry list. Before I go into this article in detail, just a note to say that I have no real affiliation with either Zoomerang or Survey Monkey, other than I have used both of their products in the past for various reasons, and found them both to be robust, capable, online survey programs. I do have an acquaintance at Zoomerang that I know through a previous position, and at one time we discussed some potential contract work related to Zoomerang, but I didn’t end up doing any work for them.

I took a look at SurveyMonkey first:

Survey Monkey's homepage as of 2-15-09

I saw the pricing button right away, and after clicking on that, I was able to see that my client could pay for a couple months of service and that would work for them.

Survey Monkey's pricing page

Survey Monkey didn’t have anything on the homepage about SSL being a feature, but they did have a “need help” in the upper right corner, and so I clicked it and got a search area. I typed in SSL and got the response “What is SSL encryption and what level do you offer?” where I found that I could add it for $9.95 a month. That’s all the info I needed.

When I went to Zoomerang, I searched the homepage, but couldn’t see any clear area to go to see pricing information:

Zoomerang's homepage as of 2-15-09

So I clicked on “online surveys” thinking I would get more information (which was a little odd because I originally thought that online surveys is all that Zoomerang offers, but that is not the case it seems). On that page I could see some pricing information, but it was written in such a way that I couldn’t tell for sure if I needed to sign up for a whole year at a time, or if I could just pay monthly:

Zoomerang's "online surveys" page

One might be tempted by the multiple “sign up now” and “use it free” buttons, but we all know that the free version isn’t going to have everything the paid version does. We want to know what those differences are before we sign up for anything. SurveyMonkey gave us a nice chart, but I don’t see an obvious chart on Zoomerang.

I also got stopped up for a minute considering the links on the left for “Event Planning,” “For Business,” “Non-profit,” etc. It seems that Zoomerang wants me to self-identify with one of these categories, perhaps to offer me a special deal. But as a user, let’s say I’m a small theatre company. I’m a non-profit, so that fits. But aren’t I also a business too? And if I’m doing a survey about an upcoming event, does that mean that I am “event planning”? Author Barry Schwartz (watch him in this video) in his book “The Paradox of Choice” says that when people are presented with too many options, they become paralyzed to taking any step. One of the reasons they become paralyzed is that they are unsure if they will make the “wrong” choice and miss out on the “best” option.

I never did find any search on Zoomerang that allowed me to look for SSL as an option, or any feature page that mentioned it. But I didn’t look for more than a minute or so. That’s about all the time you can ask somebody to search for something on your site.

How does an easy to navigate site impact your arts group’s website?

What information are people looking for on your arts website? And how is that information being displayed to the user in a useful way? If you are a presenting organization, people are probably looking for an easy way to see how much tickets cost (including fees, people don’t like surprises). Do you list the ticket prices with associated fees right on the page for your event? Or do you just have the user find out the actual costs once they start to buy a ticket in the checkout process? Displaying the former will lead to more people doing the latter.

Are there useless choices on your arts website, that clutter things up and increase my choices to click, without helping me to buy a ticket or find the info I need? Remove them. Google ads that aren’t bringing in any money? Remove them. Links to individual past shows on your homepage? Put them on a separate page called “Our Past Shows” and link to it from the homepage.  Are there directions to get to your location as a link from the homepage, or are the buried under a “contact us” page? I shouldn’t need to contact you to ask for directions on how to get to your theater, so why would I expect to find that information under the “contact us” page?

It’s these sorts of things that when done right, give patrons the subconscious idea that you have a “good” website. They are able to find what they need quickly and easily, with a minimum of thought. “Bad” websites “make you think” as you hunt to find the information. Remove anything that is unneeded and dilutes my choices. Allow me to search your site for a keyword I may be looking for so I can find the information. And put things on pages where I expect to find them (such as finding directions on a page called “directions” and not on “contact us”).

Ultimately, it was my recommendation to the client that they use SurveyMonkey, because I was able to find the information I needed quickly, and that gave me the confidence that using their system would be just as easy for the client. Don’t get me wrong, Zoomerang is a great system, but their website could use improvement to the ease of getting the information I’m looking for.

How does your arts website stack up as far as ease of use? Want to have it evaluated? Email us and we’ll take a look. We may even feature it on an upcoming blogpost!

UPDATE — August 25, 2009

Zoomerang has made a few changes for the better to their homepage design:

Zoomerang has made changes to their homepage -- you can find pricing easier now.

They’ve reduced the clutter, added an attractive face, and most importantly, included a choice to get to the pricing information quickly. This is a great improvement. There still is no search capability that I can see, and under the “Online surveys” tab at the top they still have the difficult to understand list of the surveys they have for different groups (nonprofit, business, etc.) but I think what they’ve done in this round is a good step towards a more friendly and easy to use site. Keep it coming Zoomerang!

What incremental change for the better can you make to your site? Have us review your web presence and tell you simple, low-cost user interface improvements. Contact us to have us take a look.

Ron

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We estimate roughly 10% of your arts audience is playing around with Twitter.

By now, you know about Twitter. You can’t avoid it — the mainstream media has picked up the love affair and is spreading the Twitter love far and wide. I recently did a bit of analysis on the Twitter account saturation in the email subscribers a few of our clients, and the results were intriguing.

I scanned the email address databases of five of my arts clients, looking for people who were in their email database, who also had a Twitter account. The five arts organizations were a variety of genres and budget sizes from small to large, so it was interesting to see the same statistics across the board.

Twitter statistics

• 10% of the email subscribers had a Twitter account associated with their email address.
• Roughly 1/2 of those patrons with Twitter accounts had not uploaded a picture to use as their Twitter avatar.

I interpret the latter to mean that those people who have not uploaded a picture are still in the “sampling Twitter” phase — just logging in and “lurking” around trying to figure it all out. That’s actually good — we want our audiences to be playing with the new tools. But I don’t count these folks as being “power players” yet, as they probably won’t be following a lot of people or participating to any great degree until they decide if they want to fully get on the bus, which I measure by the action of them uploading an image of themselves. That action is sort of “staking a claim” on your own little corner of Twitter, and letting everybody know you’re ready to play.

Twitter use by all arts organizations?

So, if you’re ok with making the jump to roughly apply the above data to all arts organizations, Twitter campaigns currently reach about 5% of your existing audiences who are active Twitter users. That’s pretty low currently, but it’s growing rapidly, and you should participate and continue to help it grow, as more and more focus is moving towards up-to-the-minute feedback and reviews after a performance for example.  Also, the ability to acquire new Twitter followers through friends of current followers IS a powerful reason to keep using Twitter, along with the generally younger audience base that comes with Twitter. But it is important to remember that “recently new” communication tools like email marketing are still the workhorses of arts marketing, reaching a much higher percentage of your arts patrons, so you definitely don’t want to slack on the “tried and true.”

I’m sure the above stats are changing as time marches on. Those 5% that are just experimenting right now may jump on board, and new folks will take their place experimenting. In a year, I expect more than 10% of arts audiences to be “actively” using Twitter (with their image uploaded) and a new 10% will be in the experimentation stage. We’re planning to repeat the same experiment in a year with these five clients, to see how the numbers changed. If you have any stats of your own on Twitter saturation in your arts audiences, please leave a comment and let us know. Also, groupofminds is on Twitter, so if you’re not currently a follower and would like to see more of the in-the-moment posts, please follow us.

Ron

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A revenue stream for Facebook -- a benefit for arts organizations!

When Facebook first launched, many people were confused about the two options available for featuring arts organizations: Facebook Groups vs. Facebook Pages. (I need to stop for a moment and mention that Facebook needs to work out a different name for “Facebook Pages” — isn’t every page on Facebook a Facebook page? Most people commonly refer to Facebook Pages as “fan pages” now, but Facebook has yet to officially update their documentation to reflect this. But I digress.)

In the beginning, there were Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages. Groups offered the very special ability for the arts organization to directly connect with members of the group via a sort of intra-Facebook email system. So you could (and still can) use this tool to send a message that will arrive in the person’s “Facebook email” inbox. Fan pages offered a messaging system called an “update” that would allow you to send a message to all of your fans, but sadly the message would go to place in the user’s profile that most people never check. I’ve known folks to say “Yes, I became a fan, but I never hear from them” only to discover that their fan update inbox was filled with notes they had never seen. Given the checks and balances between the two options, Facebook Groups used to be the better way to go.

About three months ago, Facebook made a very significant change to the way fan pages function, making them much more powerful…

The change allowed Facebook fan pages to post to the individual fan’s newsfeed — that long, scrolling tickertape of never-ending messages from all of your friends. Depending on when you logged into Facebook, this allowed a fan page to place its message right in front of your eyes, where you could comment on it, “like” it, share it, or interact with it in other ways. Each interaction you made would also be shown to your friends on their newsfeeds, and thus your interaction had the potential to become viral. It’s this reason that we now recommend Facebook fan pages over Facebook groups for arts organizations. (Use the group for your intra-company members, use a fan page for patrons).

But that newsfeed thing… here’s the problem. Let’s say you, regular Joe, have two hundred friends on Facebook, and each friend of yours is posting three or four status updates on Facebook every day. So we’re talking six hundred to eight hundred messages in your personal newsfeed stream every day. You are also a fan of several organizations, and those organizations post throughout the day. If you, Joe, login to Facebook a couple of times a day, you’ll see whatever the latest posts in the newsfeed are, but you’re not going to go back and read the six hundred status updates that have happened since you last logged in — You just dip your toe in the stream and read the latest stuff, and go about your other Facebook business.

This means that it is very likely that the fan page post from the Cupertino Theatre Company that came out an hour before you logged in is not one of the posts you’ll see in your most recent newsfeed items.

Now, if the arts organization fan page has a lot of fans, that’s great. Every post that is sent out from the fan page will be seen by a few fans that happen to be logged on at the time the post is sent out, and they will have the opportunity to react to it in the ways I’ve outlined above. It’s a numbers game really. But for a fan page with not many fans, you’re not going to see a lot of interaction, as not many fans will see it when the post is sent.

So, Facebook, want to make some money?

Give arts organizations the ability to buy a new special posting feature:  allow a fan page post to “pause” in the stream of the fans. So that it doesn’t matter when Joe logs into Facebook, he will see the fan page post at the top of his newsfeed, just like it had just been posted a minute ago. All fans of a fan page will see the post whenever they login — not just the select few that happen to be logged in right when the post goes out. Consider this a sort of “perma-post” or perhaps a “stickypost” that sticks around and doesn’t get washed away in the stream. Only the latest post from a fan page would be sticky — this prevents a bunch of posts from “stacking up” in the newsfeed. The post doesn’t need to look any different than a regular post — the patron actually doesn’t even need to know that there is a sort of paid placement happening — to him/her, it will always look like they timed it “just right” and their connection to the fan page will increase. Facebook, I would pay something for the ability to do this, and our clients would too. If you consider that Americans for the Arts estimates that there are roughly 100,000 arts groups in the U.S., and let’s say 40% of them have a presence on Facebook, and 10% of those groups use this service, that’s 4,000 groups. If you charged $20 a month for a “super fan page” with this ability plus a few additional bells and whistles (which would be well worth it to arts organizations), that’s a cool $960,000 a year just from arts groups. Just from arts groups mind you — this isn’t considering all of the other business genres on Facebook.

FB friends, it’s a cash cow that requires very little maintenance and can be self-managed by the user. How about it? -Ron

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Freedom from annoying audience members looks like this in France.

The French are known for many things… their appreciation of great food and wine, their love of art and culture, and now, by me, for their valiant belief that concert halls, movie theaters, and other public performance spaces should be free of that person next to you jabbering into his/her cell phone. Thanks to mobile phone jamming devices, you can actually hear the music without patron accompaniment.

Cell-phone jammers

We’ve all be sitting in the audience in the middle of a brilliant monologue, deeply in the moment, when someone’s ring tone starts chirping. It gets louder as the person digs it out of their pocket/bag, and hopefully shuts off. (Even worse, I saw an audience person answer it and carry on a conversation until the people in front of him got up, turned around, and shhhhhed him). Enter the cell-phone jammer.

A cell phone jammer is a (usually) small, hand-held device that transmits white noise on the same radio frequencies that cell phones use, thus scrambling their signal to the cell tower and rendering them useless. Usually they have a range of about 30 feet, and all cellular communications are interrupted within that radius with a simple flip of a switch. It sounds like the perfect form of revenge. Somebody being annoying on their phone? Hit the switch in your pocket and their line is dead. A larger version could blanket a concert hall with blissful silence during performances. Which is why the French jumped on the idea and in December of 2004, legalized cell-phone jammers in movie theaters, concert halls, and other performing-arts spaces. Brilliant!

But not in the U.S.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case in the U.S., as being in possession of a cell-phone jammer can land you in hot water with the FCC, and possibly stick you with an $11,000 fine or imprison you for 1 year. The ban is based on wording in the Communications Act of 1934, which prevents people from interfering with radio communications. And it is seen as property theft, because telecommunications companies such as AT&T have paid the government billions to be able to use those frequencies, and blocking those frequencies disallows access to what they have paid for. So kids, don’t try this at home.

The other argument against is the issue of emergency calls. Having a heart attack? Your jammed phone would be useless to call 911 — all signals are blocked, not just the “bad” ones. French technology firms are reportedly working on solutions to this that would have the devices jam all calls except the ones going to police, fire, etc. Makes sense… people have gotten by just fine watching arts events without cell phones for the last couple of thousand years — most things are not THAT urgent. At a time where we are seeing people interacting with their phones more, I’d love to see this technology linked with the house lights. House lights up? Take pictures, text, call your folks, whatever. Lights go down? Signals jammed until intermission. This would allow you to more fully enter the world of the art, with quick access back to the “real” world when the art wasn’t being performed. What about people who like to tweet during performances? Perhaps data access is allowed but calls are blocked. But I’d ask folks who want access during the show to sit in a different section so that the visual noise pollution of their screens doesn’t bother other patrons.

Since jammers are out of bounds in the U.S. at the moment (drop a note to your congressperson if you’re for them) so what can an arts group do to control calls? One way is to build a theater space that passively blocks cellular signals by putting the patron inside thick walls of concrete or a steel cage around the space. I’ve even read about certain wallpapers that have tiny metal fragments in the paper to block cellular signals. Stick a wifi access point inside the space for people to be able to tweet or text (if that’s your thing) and you’re good to go.

Many audience development tactics are based on new technologies being introduced to increase interaction and participation — not nearly as many are designed to reduce distraction and take away obstacles to engagement. Let’s hear it for the French government, and their belief that performing arts spaces should be free of the wrong type of stage chatter!

-Ron Evans

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Only accept credit cards in a secure way, to protect your patron's information

I’d be hard pressed to find a member of an arts organization who doesn’t believe in the power of providing the option to sell tickets online. It gives many people a way to serve themselves (thus reducing your manpower needed at the box office to answer the phone), offers the patron the peace of mind of knowing that the ticket has been purchased, and usually offers additional benefits such as seeing your seat location, and being able to buy a ticket any night or day.

Some groups I know have chaffed at the additional credit card processing fees, merchant account fees, or ticketing vendor fees of using a real ticketing system, and opted instead to collect credit card information online via a form, through an email, or into an unsecure database. Yes, you avoid additional fees that way, but is the cost of potentially exposing your patron’s credit card and identity information to hackers and thieves worth it? I don’t think so — and one lawsuit from an angry patron would seal the deal.

Typically, groups get in trouble when they set up their own form to “reserve your tickets online” via their website, and that form asks for credit card information. Once a patron fills out the form and enters his/her credit card information, the form sends the patron’s info in an email to the box office staff. The email is usually passed through many computers on the internet, before it gets to the box office staff: imagine an old-fashioned fire brigade, where townsfolk are passing bucket after bucket of water down the line:

In this case, each “bucket” is an email. And for a moment, each email is available to be read by each computer that passes it on. It just takes one random computer in the system to be set up to snoop into your email looking for credit card numbers as they pass through, and poof — card number stolen.

“But we’ve got a security certificate for our form page… there’s a lock and it says “https://” some have said. While this is a good step, you’re not necessarily out of the woods — if you are still getting credit card numbers delivered to your box office via email, it doesn’t matter if the form used to submit the email is secure, the security breach happens when the email is passed from internet computer to computer and finally to your inbox. The golden rule is: no credit card numbers should be sent or received via email, ever.

The benefits of using a “real” ticketing system

The benefits of using an actual ticket system, such as tix.com, vendini.com, brownpapertickets.com, etc., is that each of those vendors actually processes the card for you — the card is submitted via an encrypted, secure https:// form, “run” (card is charged) and then the card number is deleted as soon as the transaction is complete. Everything stays secure from start to finish, as nothing goes over email, and the card number is not stored, so it can’t be hacked into or stolen at some other time. The processor only stores the credit card number long enough to run the transaction, and that’s it. The card is either accepted (ticket sold) or rejected due to it being expired, limit exceeded, etc.

In addition to the card processing security, by going with a “real” ticketing vendor, you’ll receive updates to the system that will make it easier and safer for patrons to purchase tickets as time goes on.

Credit card processing fees are a cost of doing business, and should just be factored into your planning. Some groups make the consumer pay for the convenience of helping themselves online, which, if you’re trying to make your life easier, isn’t the way to go. Cut it out! Decrease phone calls into your box office by people that could be helping themselves online, and thus staying out of your hair — it’s simple. Make your ticketing fees less expensive when purchased online, and more expensive when people call the box office. The airlines have been doing this for years — book online, no fee. Call an agent, pay $15. It works — it helps automate the system, and that saves you time and money.

But to do all of this in a way that protects the security of your patrons, you need a real ticketing system like those mentioned above. There are thousands of ticketing software vendors — too many to research yourself, so contact us, or ask a fellow arts group who they use. Depending on your needs, different vendors offer different advantages and disadvantages. By going with a mainstream vendor, you’ll help ensure safe ticket sales for your arts patrons.

-Ron Evans, groupofminds.com

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Finding ways to save 10% is not as difficult as you think!

A recent article in our local paper mentioned that arts & cultural groups should have a plan in place to cut their expenses by 10%, before they need to use it. Just so the plan is ready to go. We think that’s a great idea, and decided to pluck out some ideas. While the following is certainly not an extensive list, a few easy ways to save 10% came to mind:

1. Prepay and save with your 3rd-party subscriptions — check out your organization’s monthly credit card bill for the 3rd-party companies you use for a variety of business services, such as Quickbooks Online for accounting, Constant Contact for email marketing, or Salesforce for CRM. Most organizations give you a substantial discount (10% to 20% for paying up front for 6 or 12 months. If you know for sure you’re going to use it for that amount of time, sign up in bulk, and save.

2. Renegotiate your ticketing contract — when you signed up with tix.com or ticketweb.com, or whomever, you no doubt signed an agreement on fees, percentages you get to keep, etc. Maybe the fee is $1 a ticket or something like that. Now that you’ve been with them awhile and been a good customer, call them up and ask for the fees to be reduced. If they balk, tell them “every little bit helps” and mention you may have to look at other ticketing vendors if you need to. Most small to mid-sized players will quickly consider adjusting your rates for you.

3. Simplify your printed programs – a glossy program looks great and gives off a professional feel. But people won’t remember the program, they’ll remember the production. Cut out as many pages as you can and go with fewer colors (or switch to black and white) to save costs on printing. In your curtain speech, ask folks who don’t wish to keep their programs to please recycle them in the lobby on the way out, and provide an easy-to-see bin to do this. Pass the recycled ones out to tomorrow’s audience so you can print fewer of them.

4. Ask for discounts from your advertising outlets — people know budgets have been cut way back on advertising, which means you can get a lot more advertising exposure for your money right now. Don’t be afraid to ask for it. Get their price and make a counter-offer, stating that budget is tight. They will often go for it, especially if it’s near their deadline for submission.

5. Use freelancers — if you’re contemplating hiring a full-time person but don’t have enough work for a full-time person, avoid paying benefits and extra expenses by hiring a freelancer to do specific tasks for you. (In all fairness, this is a tip that benefits GroupOfMinds too, since we offer by-the-hour arts marketing and consulting services, but it can be applied to many other types of things you need done.) Save your full-time staff for jobs that must be done in house, or that require communication with many established relationships.

6. Save energy — this is an old one but a good one, and green too. Close doors in your office that don’t need to be heated if they are not being used. Replace any bulbs you have with compact fluorescent bulbs (did you know you can get dimmable ones now? Awesome!) wherever you can. Unplug “phantom power” devices that are plugged in and waiting to be turned on by remote — this can be everything from clock radios to TVs to coffeemakers and more. It’s not difficult to reduce your utility bill by 10% with a little thought to your everyday behaviors.

7. Shared mail databases — contact your local arts council or arts service organization, and ask them if they offer access to a shared mail database. Using a SMD allows several arts organizations to pool their patron snail mail addresses and buying history, and to then buy the names back out to mail to. The idea here is that the best prospect of getting a new arts patron for your organization is to market to “arts people” that usually go to other arts organizations. Getting arts groups to work together like this can be like herding cats, but once you get past the idea of “protecting” your patron information, and that people will go to more than one arts group,  the benefits are huge. I know a large regional ballet company that went from spending more than $100,000 a year on mailings to only spending $35,000 and getting a higher hit rate. Huge.

8. Use a discount code online — need something printed? We like psprint.com and vistaprint.com for low-cost and great-quality printing. Both of these internet print houses always have different coupon codes that are easy to find online. Do a google search for “psprint discount code” and you’ll find them. Both also offer discounts if you sign up for their email newsletter (though vistaprint sends a little too often). Discounts of way more than 10% are easy to get.

9. Find a local buddy arts organization, and share — that flat you just bought to turn into a castle wall in Camelot can be repainted by the theater down the road for Guys and Dolls. Share sets, props, lighting equipment, storage and rehearsal space, etc.

10. Save on software: go freetech or opensource — are you paying $40 a year for each of your email accounts and getting bombarded by spam? Google Apps allows you to have email in the yourname@yourdomain.com format for free, and gives you a swell suite of other free collaboration tools. Need Adobe Photoshop but don’t have $600 per license? You can use The GIMP instead — it’s a great opensource (and free) image editing software. OpenOffice is a free suite of software that mimics Microsoft Office. If you can think of it, there is probably an opensource version of it somewhere.

With a minset to save and collaborate, savings of 10% is not only possible, but may open up new doors of collaboration that you haven’t considered thus far. The arts will weather this downturn — people still need to escape and hear a good story, see a wonderful piece of art, or listen to a musical journey. And when times are good again, you’ll still be saving money. Have other ideas to save 10%? Stick them in the comments!

-Ron Evans

If you’re looking for one-on-one arts marketing and audience development assistance, please contact us for a free consultation to learn how we can help you increase attendance and impact using technology.

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So if you’ve been here for a little while, you’ll know that the folks at GroupofMinds are big supporters of arts groups using email. I think it’s one of the most effective, efficient, and low-cost ways of getting your message out. I’ve blogged before about some things groups should avoid doing with email, and just recently, a couple of messages popped into my inbox that could use some improvement. Consider this screenshot of an email ad I received from the San Jose Mercury News:

An ad from the San Jose Mercury News (click to enlarge)

What’s missing here?

You guessed it — content! I can tell it’s from the San Jose Mercury News, and I can see Subscribe/Unsubscribe information (and the average user is thinking about that right about now). What’s missing is the body of the newsletter. It’s there, but unfortunately it isn’t being communicated to me because the San Jose Mercury News decided to send this ad as one large image, which is being automatically blocked by my Google Gmail software.

Most email software blocks images by default. I need to move up onto the green bar to select “Always display images…” to make the image show. “But you only need to do that once to see the images” you may say. Yes, and that is one time too many. Studies show that people give you about 3 seconds of their time to consider your email — one for the subject line, one to try to recognize the person in the “from” line, and one for the body of the email. And I’m afraid that based on this format, the Merc didn’t reach a lot of people. Knowing what it costs to send an ad through the Merc, it’s sad that Team In Training wasn’t able to reach as many people as it could have.

Problem: One large image with all of your offer information will be blocked by many email clients.

Solution: Send your offer information as html text, and include images to spruce up the message, but don’t make the images required.

How to fix it? Simply use images only as “set dressing” for your email — the email should stand on its own, with all of the who, what, where, when, why, and how much all displayed in text. And then use images to give it more impact. But viewing an image to see the offer should never be a requirement — not only does it just look bad, but nobody should risk annoying their subscribers by making them click on things to receive your message when they shouldn’t have to.

I did click on the “Display images” link, and here’s what I ended up with:

The image from the Mercury News ad, once images were turned on (click image to enlarge)

I’m not crazy about the black text on the dark background, but it’s a nice image. If I were to redo this, I’d simply make all of the copy in the email into html text, and then ad the image in the middle of the text headline and body. For simplicity, I’ve taken a screenshot of what this might look like — just know that in an actual email, the headline and body text would be regular html text that you can highlight, copy, paste, or whatever.

A optimized for email version, where the image is not vital (click image to enlarge)

When and if the image above doesn’t show up because of email settings, you’ll still see the “meat” of the message, which would look something like this:

This is what the email would look like without the images turned on (click image to enlarge)

The result is that your message still gets through, regardless of image blocking. And that’s what’s important.

Beware making the patron ask “Who are you?”

On a different note, I also recently ran into the following email in my inbox:

A message from a group on LinkedIn (click image to enlarge)

When I received the teaser to this message in my email from a fellow alumni, I clicked to get more information, and ended up reading this message multiple times. The problem is that I have no idea who this group is. What’s Links Hall? What is “THAW: Melting Point”? It looks like there will be performances, but I’m not sure who/what they are. Is “Sonotheque” one of the performers?

So in this case, a message got to me, but it’s not applicable to me because I have no idea what this group is, or why I should care about it, let alone what is actually happening at this event (and putting aside that I live in California, so I’m probably not going to be able to attend this Chicago event anyway).

Problem: Not considering that subscribers on your list have different amounts of knowledge and understanding about your group as you (the writer) do.

Solution: Give some background information and let me know where to find out more.

I took a rare leap of faith and linked over to http://linkshall.org, which was the only link in the email. Ah! On the front page, I see:

“MISSION STATEMENT: Links Hall encourages artistic innovation and public engagement by maintaining a facility and providing flexible programming for the research, development, and presentation of new work in the performing arts.”

There we go. I’d recommend to Links Hall that their mission statement, along with some text like “Not familar with Links Hall? Find out about our great facilities and programs that make Chicago a better place for artists and arts patrons: http://linkshall.org” be added to their email blasts.

Although I can’t attend, I know a friend in Chicago who used to work with me in the arts, and is trying to get into the Chicago arts scene. Perhaps this would be a good event for her to go to, so perhaps I should forward her this information.

And I could have gotten to that decision much faster if only I’d not had to dig for the info. Most people won’t dig for the info though, sadly. They will just give up and move on. If it’s your hope that people understand your message, especially enough to forward your info on to new people — remember to give folks a way to quickly understand who you are, what you want them to do, and why it’s important that they listen. It really makes the difference between an email that gets acted on, or one that just goes to the deleted (or worse, the SPAM) folder.

-Ron Evans, GroupOfMinds.com

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Markets are down, raise your marketing up!

Difficult economic times call for different ways of thinking about marketing. From arts organizations looking to fill a seat, to restaurant managers trying to sell a dinner, the issue is the same: how to keep patrons coming in and participating with your organization.

In many cases, an organization’s first response to needing to save money in a down economy is to cut costs, and often times the first budget to go is marketing. But when you stop to think about it, marketing is one of the only direct expense-to-income streams you have. Marketing is a revenue generator, not simply an expense, so your organization should be budgeting to market MORE in a down economy, and to market smartly as much as possible. Let’s talk about some easy ways to do this with a goal of not raising expenses or reducing revenues.

Let them know you care

First things first. Your patrons want to know that you understand what’s going on with the economy, and that you realize that it may be harder for them to participate with you. Let them know that you feel their pain, and “sell into the market” by changing your message to reflect your understanding. As an example, theater companies should let their patrons know about existing “pay as you go nights,” opportunities to usher before a show, or even ways to volunteer with the organization in return for access to performances. You may just get a long-term set of helping hands to move you forward. A restaurant can easily mention their regular happy hour specials, with a slant to “fill up on our great appetizers.” It gets them in the door, without a need to discount your product.

Sell them on the benefits

What are the benefits of going to a musical performance or having a nice dinner out? How do those things change when society is stressed by the economy? Focus on relaxation, peace of mind, fun with friends, and “escape” to your patrons — all things that “get them away from it all,” even for a short time. Starbucks became successful because people found that they could enjoy a small indulgence for just a couple of dollars. People are looking for excuses to “treat themselves,” especially when they have already decided to curtail their big vacations and new tv purchases, and savvy marketers should jump to fill in the gap.

Offer helpful information that allows people to participate more easily

Are there factors around participation with your organization that you can help streamline for your patrons? Is your venue near public transportation? Let your customers know they can save money on parking by taking the train to your stop. Are there other things to do nearby that could save time for them? Remember the coffeeshop/laundry combination, where people drop off their clothes and then go next door for a cup a joe? Examine the process that someone needs to go through to participate with you, from calling to make a reservation or buying a ticket, to getting back home again, and look for ways to turn lemons into marketing lemonade.

Make partnerships and market together

Who nearby has a business or service that is complimentary to your own? Arts groups and restaurants make wonderful partners. As an example, let’s say an arts group and a restaurant both have an email list of 1000 people, respectively. Both can, of course, create a special offer that gives their customers 25% off their product. Unfortunately, this creates discounted revenue from people that are knowledgeable about your organization and are already ok with paying the full regular price. While promotions based on price can be effective in getting new customers, you should avoid using price to try to influence existing customers.

If the arts group partners with the restaurant however, its easy to send a 25% food discount offer to the arts patrons, without discounting their arts event ticket price. The restaurant gets exposed to 1000 new people vs. their same old list. In reverse, the restaurant would send a discount arts ticket offer to its restaurant patrons, as a benefit to an experience to be had after dinner. Both groups double their exposure, and provide a benefit without cannibalizing their existing customers with a discount offer of their own. Powerful and effective collaborative marketing at its best.

Add value instead of discounting

It can be difficult to resist the powerful urge to use price as a way to market to your existing customers. But tough times do call for a little more “bang for your buck” to get people in the door. Instead of offering a discount, what can you add of value to the experience? Can you create a value that does not cost you money where one did not exist before? It could be as simple as getting your email list to respond to an offer for priority seating in your general admission theater — let folks who respond to the offer into the theater first as a benefit to being on your email list, and then open it up to everybody else. Doesn’t cost your organization anything, but creates a value idea of “getting the best seats.” Talkback sessions with your show’s director or cast members are another free and easy value, that also helps people to understand the work to a greater degree. Or tell your restaurant patrons that on Thursday nights, the executive chef will come to each table and explain the history and the influences of the dishes he or she has created. Again, that knowledge exists, the chef exists, and you can create an interesting, valuable benefit for free, where one didn’t exist before.

When times are tough, organizations that market smartly can create revenue in new and interesting ways, that get the attention of the public. While people may quickly get used to discounts, you stand a great chance at getting and keeping their attention by creating promotions that bring value to their lives in other ways. Get your marketing team together and brainstorm on some of these no-cost ways to drive participation, and odds are you’ll enjoy no-risk rewards!

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